Will Crockett on Singularity 1 on 1: Hybrid Photography is the Future, DSLR’s are the Past!

Will Crockett is a photo innovator and web TV personality. He has more than 30 years as a commercial photographer with clients like Pfizer, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, Cadbury, United Airlines, TIME magazine and the US Pentagon.

Crocket is also the man behind DiscoverMirrorless.com and ShootSmarter.com as well as a prototype test shooter for many camera manufacturers. [His early reviews were the main reason why I ended up buying a Panasonic GH3 camera to shoot my in-person interviews with.]

During my interview with Will Crockett we cover a variety of topics such as: how and why he fell in love with photography; hybrid photography and the end of the DSLR; the benefits of mirrorless cameras; amazing features of future products coming to market the next 6 to 12 months; the proliferation of cameras and monitors and the impact thereof; intelligent resolution, face detection and face recognition; 3D imaging; future of professional photography; copyright and social media…

My favorite Crockett quote that I will remember from our conversation is:

“Think what people want and let’s go give it to them. Not what we can do and try and sell it to them.”

(As always you can listen to or download the audio file above, or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. If you want to help me produce more episodes please make a donation)

What is Hybrid Photography?

Why Mirrorless is Better than DSLR

Who is Will Crockett?

Side By Side [documentary trailer]:

Digital technology has created a groundbreaking evolution in cinema, challenging film as the standard format for motion pictures. In the new documentary Side By Side, Keanu Reeves takes us on a tour of the past and future of the moviemaking process.

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Photography Socrates??
Did you run out of Singularitarians?

https://www.singularityweblog.com/ Socrates

No worries friend, I have many Singularitarians and Transhumanists coming up after this. I just thought that it would be fun to talk about the future of image technologies a little bit and Will Crocket is such a great interlocutor.

I mean – modern cameras are super computers nowadays with full on artificial intelligence technology such as face detection, face recognition and intelligent image resolution.

Also, more and more people are doing hybrid photography i.e. both video and pictures, these exponentially growing image technologies do and will continue to have a profound effect on our whole society. Thus I thought it is an important topic to discuss.

Do you not agree?!…

https://www.singularityweblog.com/ Socrates

Another famous proponent of the same argument is Zack Arias. Check out his video about the X100S (in Istanbul): “the DSLR is dead […] it’s the greatest camera ever made. I’ll fight you in the streets, if you think differently!” So who’d like to challange Zack? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlbaWP3mVVA

I run a publishing company that covers motorcycle racing, and the possibilities for artificial intelligence in cameras are certainly relevant to us. I’m glad you did this interview. Sports photography is laden with challenges that could be overcome with smarter cameras.

A day at the races is so difficult for our photographers. They shoot from first thing in the morning through late at night sometimes, all the while our edit staff is asking for photos so we can lead the charge as far as web coverage throughout the day goes. So photographers shoot for a bit, then hightail it to the press box where they dump their images and do a crude review so they can get acceptable images off to the editors. They don’t have time to make sure they’re sending the best possible images, because there’s always more shooting to do. When the racing is over, usually around 11 pm local time, they need to do another dump/edit, and it’s still just preliminary editing compared to what they’ll need to do when they get home. It’s a huge job that could be fundamentally transformed by cameras with better AI.

I imagine a camera that can identify riders/athletes, after learning their numbers (every rider has a unique one, so this is a really strong identifying factor), the class the riders are in, bike brand, gear brand, general company-logo presence, and as AI strengthens, maybe even riding and body style. As a photographer shoots, the camera IDs every rider it can and wirelessly and in real time dumps a web-sized image into a folder structure on the cloud that can be accessed by the editorial staff, and maybe even directly by our readers, all the while ranking the images in each rider folder based on the quality of photo, as determined by an AI analysis of sharpness, exposure, etc.